Re: more on "wifi no longer working under ubuntu"

[Alan White <awhite0006 gmail com>]

Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 1:36 PM, Alan White <awhite0006 gmail com> wrote:
>
>   
> > Left to my own resources I'd back up all my /home files and do a fresh
> > install of the latest LTS Ubuntu on that partition, and I'll need to do that
> > SOON, but it surely seems like overkill for what seems (to me) to be a
> > simple mis-configuration or other simple issue. I'm ALMOST there... I think.
> >     
>
> I'd also think it's misconfiguration. Can you make sure you have the
> Notification Area widget added to your panel? There's no arm in adding
> a new one to be sure, so you can do the following:
>
> 1) right click the top panel, select "Add to panel"
> 2) Scroll to "Notification Area", click it and click "Add"
>
>   
I tried to add a notification area, and it would not let me: said there 
was already one running, which there was. I manually ran another 
nm-applet, and it came up as usual, and stayed. There had been another 
message on reboot, which was that "tray lost focus."
> > At this point the window popped up to ask me the password for my wireless
> > network. The pulldown was grayed out. Only choice available was "Cancel." So
> > I chose that:
> >     
>
> I don't know why there would be a pull-down there, I just can't
> picture it. Maybe you could attach a screenshot? But usually, if it's
> asking you for a password, just enter something in the text field and
> the OK button will become active.
>
> If you send a screenshot, make sure it's one of the full screen, maybe
> we can notice something that will clarify what is going on.
>
>   
Here's a screenshot: attached are 4. As you can see, I've advanced; 
reboots help but I do not know why. But now am stuck on the default 
keyring, which is locked and I can't unlock it. I tried adding another 
keyring as default and unlocking it, and it unlocked OK but that didn't 
work for nm-applet either.

Maybe I should just move along to a more-recent OS? Since reboots help, 
and things change for unknown reasons, NM doesn't seem to be very 
stable. At least on 9.04/9.10 upgrades.

I think the original issue was that I let the Ubuntu default of 
automatic-update rule ("check for updates frequently, and apply them"), 
and after one of these updates NM and wireless just stopped working. 
This was before 9.10 was out, these were just updates to Ubuntu from 
9.04. Wireless has NOT worked since then, maybe October last year. It 
worked fine from July 2009 until then, wifi came up right away in the 
local library. It still does, if I boot the laptop under Windows Vista 
Home Premium... (sorry!)

Even when I did a formal upgrade to 9.10, upgrading all along the way 
again, wifi still didn't work. This made me wonder about the Ubuntu 
upgrades breaking something, which I have read of in posts.

And it makes me leery to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04.1, apparently the 
latest LTS. Or should I go to 10.10 even though it's not an LTS?

Apologies for the length of this post; trying to get all the issues and 
possibilities in at once.

THANKS for your continued assistance!

--
Alan White
awhite0006 gmail com